


i'll walk your lands (and swim your sea)

by outruntheavalanche



Series: Endgame Fix-Its/Patch-Ups/Continuations/AUs/etc. [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: mcu_exchange, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Mixed Media, Natasha Romanov Is a Ghost, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not quite a fix-it, Reunions, Steve Rogers's Grief Beard, Thor Is a Good Bro, patch-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-05-31 15:39:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19428997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outruntheavalanche/pseuds/outruntheavalanche
Summary: After—after Thanos, after victory, aftereverything—Steve dreams about her.





	i'll walk your lands (and swim your sea)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SinginInTheRaine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinginInTheRaine/gifts).



> [](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/SinginInTheRaine/profile)[**SinginInTheRaine**](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/SinginInTheRaine/) , here's your second fic! 
> 
> So, I am not a Marvel comics canon person. If anything here contradicts known comics canon, please just think of this as an AU. Thanks!
> 
> This also overlooks a bit of movie canon regarding Vormir and the Red Skull.
> 
> Beta’d by my friends, [](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/grisecklie/profile)[**grisecklie**](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/grisecklie/) and [](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/tobalance/profile)[**tobalance**](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/tobalance/)!
> 
> Title from "It's Only Time" by the Magnetic Fields.

After—after Thanos, after victory, after _everything_ —Steve dreams about her.

Natasha. 

That’s normal, isn’t it? It’s nothing he should really be worried about, it’s a normal side-effect of grief, of losing someone you—

Except the dreams feel _real_. They feel like Nat is trying to reach out to him from a place where he can’t reach her. 

Steve had dreamt about Peggy too, for a while. Sometimes still does. Sometimes still sees the upturn of her red lips and the fall of her pin curls playing across his eyelids like an old reel of film.

But, somehow, he’d _known_ those dreams of Peggy were just that: dreams.

 _This is a dream_. No matter how many times he tells himself that, he can’t make himself believe it.

“Steve.” Natasha’s voice sounds urgent, vibrant, _alive_.

He swears he can feel her breath curling on the back of his neck, her words puffing against his skin in tendrils of damp heat.

When he turns toward the sound of her voice, she darts away, slipping out of his field of vision.

Natasha’s laugh tinkles in the air like windchimes. 

_Wake up, this is a dream this is a dream this is a dream—_

Natasha’s disembodied voice wafts over him. “Come and find me.”

Steve looks up and around; he’s on Vormir. He thinks. Everything is draped in a deep purple haze. He knows he can’t possibly be on Vormir, his mind is just substituting a place he’s visited but…

 _Wake up_.

Steve pinches the inside of his elbow, but nothing happens. His eyes don’t snap open. He doesn’t sit up to find himself tangled in sweat-damp bedsheets, pale morning light streaming through the blinds.

Nothing happens.

“Natasha,” he finally calls out to her. “Where are you? Where did you go?”

The air ripples and shimmers in front of him, particles weaving into the shape of a person. 

“I’m trapped,” Natasha says. He can see her lips move, a fraction of a second after the words hit his ears. “Stuck in a veil between worlds. I…I think I’m dead? But I’m not sure anymore.”

Steve reaches out to try and touch her hand, to try and grab hold of it, but he just ends up swiping a hand through her image and she dissipates like smoke.

Steve grasps wildly at air, feeling desperate, his throat tightening and his eyes aching. His heart clenches painfully in his chest.

He can’t lose her. Not Natasha. Not like this. It’s not—

Steve’s bedside alarm starts buzzing and his eyes snap open to a slate-gray ceiling.

 _Avengers Compound_ , he thinks, trying to shake the fog from his sleep-addled brain. _New York. Bed. **Dream**_.

Steve sits up slowly and rubs the grit from his eyes as the harsh light of reality floods in.

It’s been three weeks since their victory—that still doesn’t quite feel like a victory—and Natasha is dead. Tony is dead. Gamora is, somehow, possibly both dead _and_ missing. Thor has gone off-world. Carol’s gone off to find her missing partner and their daughter. Peter is on summer break. The Avengers have fractured and splintered. 

Worst of all, Natasha wasn’t really reaching out to him through his dreams.

Sighing wearily, he kicks off the covers and slides out of bed. Pads from the rumpled bed to the bathroom and flips on the light. He tries to avoid looking in the mirror as he pulls the medicine cabinet open and riffles through various bottles before he finds some Motrin for the headache currently pounding against the inside of his skull.

Steve pops a couple pills, then chokes them down with a splash of water from the faucet.

He closes the cabinet door and finally gets an eyeful of himself: skin waxy and pallid, dark smudges under his eyes, lines creasing the corners of his mouth and between his eyelids that he hadn’t noticed before. His shoulders slump like he’s carrying the weight of the war—all the loss—on them.

Steve sighs. Maybe he is.

The light flickers and a sudden, inexplicable chill rolls down Steve’s spine.

“Hey, Steve. Cap. I know you can hear me.” Natasha sounds like she’s under water. Muffled, like he’s got cotton stuffed in his ears.

“Not Cap anymore,” Steve mutters at his reflection.

He’s given up trying to make sense of what’s happening. Nothing makes sense anymore. What’s one more thing to add to the list?

“Sorry, force of habit,” she says. “Sam was the right choice.”

“I know,” he says. After a moment’s pause, he adds, “Glad you approve.” 

Natasha’s laugh is warm honey. “I’m glad you came back. I thought for a moment you’d stay…”

 _With Peggy_ , she doesn’t finish. She doesn’t need to.

He wants to tell her that he really was tempted. That, after all he’d lost to this war, he needed a safe place to land.

Steve wants to tell Natasha how he’d walked up the steps to Peggy’s home and knocked on the door and then suddenly she was there in the doorway, staring up at him with huge eyes that quickly filmed over with tears. And then, just as quickly, the door had slammed in his face. She’d thought he was a fake at first, a parlor trick conjured up by their enemies, but he’d convinced her to let him in. When he’d finally gotten his long-promised dance, he really did think he’d stay with her and live out the rest of his life as her husband.

Steve finally says, “I had to come back. To pass on the shield.”

“You still could have done that even if you’d stayed,” Natasha muses, sounding thoughtful. “You could have lived out the remainder of your life with Peggy and then brought the shield back for Sam.”

Steve knows he could have. There are a lot of things he could have—would have, should have—done.

“Unfinished business,” he says, pushing away from the sink and reaching up to snap off the bathroom light.

Natasha doesn’t say anything to that.

***

Steve starts doing research, digging up articles on ghosts, revenants, astral projection, auditory hallucinations.

He pours over Wiki pages and google results, occult sites, vlog posts, anything that could possibly explain what’s happening to him, to no avail. She’s probably not a ghost because ghosts aren’t real, but Steve’s seen stranger things in his lifetime. He’s not going to rule anything out just yet.

He pulls up the website for some amateur ghost hunters and Natasha knocks his computer off the kitchen island.

“I’m not a ghost,” she huffs, irritably. “I told you already. I’m trapped in a veil between worlds.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Steve sighs as he retrieves his computer. “Are you talking like…purgatory?”

“No,” she says, huffing again. Some of Steve’s computer print-outs flutter on the island, next to his half-eaten bowl of muesli. “It’s hard to explain. It’s not purgatory or anything to do with the afterlife, because I don’t think I’m dead. Not exactly, anyway.”

“Then what are you?” Steve asks, poking at the keys on his definitely-dead laptop. 

“When I died on Vormir, my soul got separated from my body,” Natasha says. “But when Tony used the Infinity Stones and put everything to rights… I think I got stuck. I’m basically trapped on the never-ending escalator in the department store between worlds.”

Steve laughs a little at the image. He can practically hear the tinkly muzak. “So how do we get you back?” 

“I don’t know, but…I’m a glitch in the system,” Natasha says. “There has to be a way to fix this.”

She sounds way more convinced than Steve currently feels.

***

Steve knows that this is going to end on Vormir. He’s going to have to go back to Vormir and bargain with Johann Schmidt—the Red Skull—for Natasha’s soul. 

“You can’t do that,” Bruce says.

“It’s insane,” Sam adds.

“It’ll never work,” Bucky says.

“Can I come too?” Peter looks up from his iPad with a hopeful glint in his eye.

Steve settles at the conference table and looks each and every one of his fellow Avengers in the eye.

“I have to bring her back,” he says. “This is the only way.”

“The Red Skull won’t bargain for souls,” says the hologram of Peter Quill, bitterly. “Believe me, I’ve tried.” 

“It’s our last shot,” Steve says, turning up his hands in supplication. “I can’t think of any other way.”

“If there was any other way, a loophole of some sort, we would’ve found it by now,” Bruce says, offering Steve a pitying look.

Steve looks away, feeling ashamed. He doesn’t want their pity. He wants their support. He needs them to have his back on this.

“I’ll go with you,” Thor pipes up. 

Everyone turns their attention to the hologram of Thor. He’s still off-world, with the Guardians, and Steve thinks he can see Quill in the background yelling at him.

“Why would you do that?” Steve can’t help but be curious. 

“I’m always up for an adventure,” Thor says, giving Steve a thumbs up. 

“Looking for trouble’s more like it,” Rocket grumbles, affectionately.

*** 

Steve’s sitting cross-legged on his bed, scratching out notes idly on a pad of paper when there’s a knock on the door.

“It’s open,” he calls out, not looking up from the lined sheet of paper. “C’mon in.” 

“Steve.”

Pepper slips into his room and closes the door gently behind her. She tucks some strawberry blond hair behind one ear and fiddles with the diamond stud in her lobe, nervously, before approaching him.

“Hey, Pepper,” he says, offering her what he hopes is a welcoming smile. He quickly shifts his notepad away, out of her line of sight. “What’s up?”

“I know you miss her,” she starts, then stops. 

Steve frowns. “What’s this about?” 

“Natasha’s gone, Steve,” Pepper murmurs, folding her arms across her chest. “Sometimes I wake out of a dead sleep, thinking I just heard Tony call my name. Or sometimes I see a shadow in the corner that has a familiar shape to it. But he’s—”

“Natasha reached out to me, Pepper,” Steve cuts her off. “I think she’s trapped in an alternate realm.”

Pepper blinks at him, stunned, then shakes her head as if to jar his words loose. “ _What_?” 

“Natasha’s… Well, I don’t think she’s dead. Not entirely, anyway,” Steve says. “I think Bruce’s gauntlet did bring her back. But only part of her, and not _all_ the way back.”

“I see,” Pepper says, slowly.

Steve sighs. “I know it sounds crazy.”

“I’ve seen plenty of crazy,” Pepper says, offering him a slight smile. “If you say Natasha’s reaching out to you, I believe you.” 

“Thanks, Pepper,” Steve says, mirroring the small smile back at her.

“If you need anything, just let me know.” She leans in, gives Steve a quick, one-armed hug and then retreats, shutting the door behind her.

Steve glances down at his notepad and frowns. Someone’s added text to his notes and it definitely wasn’t him.

“Natasha?” he calls out, his heartbeat ringing in his ears. 

“I’m here,” she replies. The pages of Steve’s notepad flutter.

“I’m going to have to go back to Vormir,” Steve says, more a statement than a question.

“Reunite my body with my soul,” she says.

“How am I going to do that?” Steve snaps, his frustration boiling over. “I don’t even know if this is for real, for one. And secondly—”

An icy finger drags down the back of his neck, between his shoulder blades and he falls silent.

“You don’t believe any of that,” she says. The cool sensation suddenly vanishes and the chill seeps out of Steve’s skin. “You know it’s me. That this is real.”

Steve sighs and scrubs his hands over his face. “I do,” he agrees, dropping his hands in his lap.

“And you know what you have to do,” Natasha says.

Steve closes his eyes, nodding. “Vormir.”

*** 

A part of Steve had been hoping Schmidt wouldn’t be there waiting for them, even though he knows how unrealistic a hope it was. The last time Steve was here, he returned the Soul Stone to its rightful place but not before begging Schmidt to free Natasha’s soul.

It hadn’t worked, not that he’d really expected it to. He’d never before heard of anyone successfully bargaining for a soul.

_“You can’t bring her soul back. It is a fool’s errand. Many before you have tried to undo what has been done. They have all failed.”_

_“They’re not me.”_

But Steve had been wrong. Not even the great Captain America could bend Schmidt to his will. Steve had left, metaphorically speaking at least, empty-handed.

Now he and Thor stand before Schmidt, prepared once again to barter and beg.

“Steven Rogers, son of Sarah.” Schmidt turns toward Thor. “Thor Odinson, son of Frigga.”

Thor grunts an acknowledgement, his hand curling tightly around Mjölnir’s handle.

“Keep my mother’s name out of your mouth,” Thor rumbles, low in his throat.

Steve glances at Thor, gives him a pat on the arm. He turns back to Schmidt and his grotesquely grinning visage. “We’re here to offer you a deal,” Steve says. 

“You cannot reverse an exchange once it’s been made,” Schmidt says, edging closer to Steve, his robes fluttering about him. “But you know that. You’ve already tried.” 

“We’re not here for a soul,” Steve says. “We’re here for her body.”

That gives Schmidt pause. “Her body.” He sounds almost baffled, as if he can’t imagine what Steve and Thor could possibly want Natasha’s body for.

“For a burial,” Steve adds, his heart jackhammering in his chest.

He hopes this works. _God_ , he hopes this works.

“Very well,” Schmidt says, lifting his arm.

Everything goes white. 

*** 

When Steve comes to, he finds himself lying in a shallow pool of water. Thor’s standing over him, Mjölnir at the ready. 

“What happened?” Steve sits up slowly, shaking water out of his hair and beard.

Thor doesn’t respond, he only holds out his hammer and Steve looks in the direction he’s pointing.

There’s someone else lying there, facedown. Water laps gently at the body—Natasha’s body, Steve quickly realizes.

He scrambles to his feet and the two of them hurry over to Natasha, turning her onto her back.

Natasha’s glassy, lifeless green eyes stare up blankly. Her red-gold hair is pasted to the sides of her gray face in clumps. Steve drags his fingertips down over her eyelids, shutting them.

Hefting Natasha’s limp body against his chest, he gets to his feet and scoops her into his arms.

Steve looks around, taking in their surroundings for a moment. Finally, he turns to Thor and says, “Let’s get the hell off this planet.”

***

When they get back to the Avengers headquarters, Steve lays Natasha’s body out on his bed. She looks almost like she’s sleeping, peaceful and serene, her hands crossed over her heart.

Steve watches over her, unsure of where to go from here. 

He hasn’t heard from Natasha’s—ghost, her voice, her presence since he and Thor left for Vormir. The absence is physically painful, an ache in his chest like someone took a scalpel to him and cut her out of his heart.

Steve drags his hands down his face.

The atmosphere in the room changes, the air shifting, stirring. Steve looks up and sees strands of Natasha’s damp hair fluttering over her unnaturally pale forehead.

“Natasha?” he calls out.

He feels a hand close over his shoulder. When he whirls around in his seat, hoping to catch hold of her, his arms close around nothing.

“I’m here,” she says, the pressure letting up on his shoulder.

Steve hears light tentative footsteps and when he looks down at the soft carpet, he can see the imprint of her soles as she approaches her body lain out on the bed. The springs creak and the mattress dips then Steve watches, transfixed, as an invisible hand brushes tendrils of stiffened hair off of Natasha’s forehead.

“Did it—can you—” Steve’s thoughts are a jumble and the right words don’t come out.

But Natasha just seems to know what he means.

“I think so,” she murmurs. “I think I can work with this.”

Steve watches, rapt, as the zipper slides down the front of Natasha’s damp jacket. The imprint of a hand appears on the front of her shirt.

For a few too-long moments, there’s only silence. Just the sound of Steve’s harsh breaths as he stares at the shape of a hand—Natasha’s hand—on the front of her T-shirt. He tries not to focus on the gray tinge to her skin, or the lifeless pallor.

A small orb of pulsing yellow light throbs in front of Natasha’s face, illuminating it in a haunting glow. Steve traces the movement of the light as it swirls like leaves on a breeze then dives down, into Natasha’s slack mouth.

The handprint on Natasha’s shirt fades.

He waits for something, anything to indicate this has worked. Steve doesn’t know what he’ll do if they—he—fails again. He doesn’t want to think about this _not_ working. It’s not even an option. He refuses to entertain the thought.

A few seconds tick by, then minutes, and Steve turns away from her empty body, his eyes stinging. He ducks his head to hide the swell of tears, though he doesn’t think Natasha is going to notice.

_It didn’t work. She’s really gone._

Steve starts to get up out of the chair when Natasha jolts upright on the bed and he nearly has a heart attack.

“Jesus Christ.” Steve staggers back, collapsing back into his chair, heartbeat pounding in his ears. “Nat?”

Natasha presses a hand against her chest, wheezing. She looks around, frantically, her eyes alight with panic. Then her gaze lands on Steve.

She drops her hand and takes a couple huge gulps of air.

“Steve,” she rasps, her voice rusty from disuse. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?” Steve asks, heartbeat settling some.

“I remember going to Vormir,” she says, frowning slightly, brows knitting. “With Clint. Then nothing much after that.”

Steve approaches the bed, cautiously, and reaches out. Natasha slides her hand into his and he squeezes.

“It’s over, Nat,” he says, sitting next to her. “We won.”

Natasha squeezes back, tugging his hand into her lap. “We won?”

Steve leans into her a little bit and Natasha leans back, resting her head against his shoulder. Her hair scratches against his cheek and the scent of death still clings lightly to her hair, but Natasha is so full of life.

Feeling Natasha solid and warm against his shoulder solidifies something within him, steeling his spine.

“Nat,” Steve says, and she lifts her head, looking up at him with a searching gaze. Her green eyes pierce him in his soul. “Nat, can I… Can I kiss you?”

Natasha’s lips twist into a smile. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to hear you ask that.”

Steve grins and leans in as Natasha tugs her hand free to knot her fingers loosely in the hairs at his nape. Steve lets a hand cup her cheek, the skin warm under his touch. 

Natasha’s _alive_.

He leans in, then pauses, hesitating for a moment as his stomach tumbles with nerves. Natasha snorts out a soft laugh against his lips and tugs him in the rest of the way until their lips finally— _finally_ —meet in the most electric kiss of Steve’s very long life. 

Natasha’s teeth are a pleasant sting on his bottom lip, and her weight settles welcomely against his chest as she presses him back until she can roll on top of him. But there’s no urgency, no desperation or need. They take their time, exploring each other, hands wandering, lips caressing and tongues tasting of one another.

Natasha finally breaks the kiss and pants into Steve’s mouth.

“If I’d known what a good kisser you are I might’ve done that a couple years ago,” she teases, tugging lightly on his beard. 

Steve slides his arms around her waist. “We’ve got time,” he says, brushing his lips lightly against hers. “All the time in the world.”

Natasha grins against his mouth. “Yeah,” she laughs, “I guess we do.”


End file.
